


Dinner and Diatribes

by heliocharis, JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Choking, Cunnilingus, F/M, Mutual Pining, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, cordelia poster dot jpg, i warned you about chairs bro, period-typical repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:06:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27853910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliocharis/pseuds/heliocharis, https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Late at night in the quiet north wing of the house, Camilla Hect knocks twice on the door between her room and Palamedes’, and wishes she didn’t have to.The young Master Warden and his valet enjoy a perfect working relationship—workingbeing the operative word. Cam wants very badly to ruin it.So, it turns out, does Palamedes.Or:a moſte comedic and droll accounting of an illiſit liaison, in which wallpaper features prominently
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 14
Kudos: 89





	Dinner and Diatribes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [necromanticatheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/necromanticatheart/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, babe
> 
> (and a huge thank you to Cam, the one, the only, the Boomer, for editing services; couldn't have done it without you <3)

Late at night in the quiet north wing of the house, Camilla Hect knocks twice on the door between her room and Palamedes’, and wishes she didn’t have to.

The dinner is still going. It would have been bearable, but for most of the people who were there. This is a scholar’s House, which continues to insist on taking itself seriously, and likes to put a lot of academics in a room with plenty of wine and watch them argue for sport. The wine tonight was drinkable and the conversation enough to kill you from the brain up.

Owing to their relative age, which is young for a Master Warden and his valet, and to the fact that they are the Master Warden and his valet, they are given more attention at these things than almost anyone. Palamedes says that because of this they have to look respectable. To him, this means dressing almost as well as he can, then having Camilla’s outfits made out of nicer fabrics and hoping the effect suffices. _That’s what I have you for, isn’t it?_ he says. _To make me presentable._ Camilla duly points out that he does an exemplary job of thwarting her efforts, and that doing his ties can only go so far, and then he duly laughs and has the clothes made anyway.

And then Camilla stands at the door, waiting to be invited in so he can take those same clothes off her, because the corset laces at the back. Palamedes helps her into and out of it each time, calls it restitution for every jacket she’s straightened (all of them) and is perfectly polite, though he must resent it.

“Come in,” is the reply, Palamedes’ dry, mild voice tinged with the same fatigue that has settled in Camilla’s bones. The key sits inside the lock on Camilla’s side of the door separating their two rooms, but has never once been turned. The door opens without a sound.

Camilla, to maintain some pretence of decency, is in a dressing gown over her corset and petticoat. Palamedes, having apparently forgotten that she would be over, is in shirt and trousers, sitting at his writing-desk with a cigarette dangling from one hand.

The rest of the scene is a series of insignificant details, which she does not notice or look at: Palamedes’ jacket and waistcoat thrown over a chair, his shoes abandoned next to it; his necktie, having fallen from the chair onto the floor; his shirt, a loose one in nice white linen, open all the way down the horror of his narrow, bird-boned chest. The naked line of his throat where his collarbones almost meet and the ribs showing next to his breastbone look like a warning. Least of them all is the fragile, elegant architecture of his hand, the long fingers holding the cigarette, the wrist a shadow of tendons and veins.

Camilla looks over at the chair.

“Warden,” she says. “If you leave your jacket like that I’ll never get it straight.”

Palamedes at least has the grace to look contrite. “Ah,” he says, as Camilla is already moving to hang it up. “Sometimes I do wonder if your job is too easy, and you would benefit from some new challenges.”

“After a party like that?”

Palamedes snorts. “What a stunt. With any luck some of them might fall in the fountain on the way out, and then it will have been worthwhile having them here at all.”

“Not convinced by their projects, I take it,” Camilla says. She hangs the jacket and waistcoat and folds the necktie, and stays by the chair, where she is only looking at him from the side.

“I think they’ve aimed for the bare minimum,” Palamedes says, “and missed. Next time I might be able to endure it if I have about twice as much wine.” He draws lazily on his cigarette and reaches forward to tap the ash off the end. If his shirt falls away to expose another few inches of skin and the edge of one dark, flat nipple, Camilla pays no attention.

“Maybe so, Warden, but then you’ll sleep badly, and our efforts to leave early will be wasted.”

Palamedes hums. “I suppose you’re right. Speaking of which,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette and unfolding himself from his chair, “don’t let me keep you. I’m ready when you are.”

Facing the chair, Camilla removes her dressing gown and hangs it neatly over the back. She can feel Palamedes’ cynically raised eyebrows as he comes to stand behind her. She can feel him decide not to. He reaches out for the laces.

* * *

All the years they have been doing this, Palamedes has established for himself certain rules. He stands a full arm’s length back, so as not to feel the heat of her skin. He consigns his hands to the laces of her corset only, watching his fingers like they belong to somebody else. He looks only at his fingers—which could belong to anybody, really, if you think about it—looks at his fingers tugging at the laces, and does not look at the muscles of her back underneath them, or the shadow of her hair on her jaw, or how tight her shoulders always seem when they do this, her hands locked around the back of the chair.

He especially tries not to think how she must hate him for making her do this, and what kind of man he must be for making her do it anyway.

Palamedes watches the edges of the corset fall away from her back, and his breath catches in his throat, fingers catching on—

“Was this really necessary, do you think?”

He taps her bicep with the flick-knife that’s fallen into his hand. If he thought about it, which he doesn’t, he could picture with perfect clarity the red mark on her waist where the corset pressed it into her skin.

Cam takes the knife from him with a snort.

“I wish it wasn’t, Warden. However…”

“Surely there must be easier ways to kill me than stabbing me over sherry. They could arrange a carriage accident. Poison me. Something like that.”

“You are a uniquely stab-able man, Warden. You invite that sort of thing,” Cam drawls laconically.

“I live in unabashed terror of the day someone finally bribes you to kill me,” he says, studiously shifting ‘things Camilla could do to me with a knife’ into the box of things he is not permitted to contemplate. “There. Hair next?”

He taps—just once, in a clinical, plausibly deniable sort of way—the small of her back, and Cam shrugs out of the corset with a deep sigh, rolling her shoulders.

“They couldn’t afford me.”

She bows her head.

Palamedes swallows, wishing—wildly, desperately, with the inchoate, nonsensical hope of the damned—that he hadn’t stubbed out his cigarette, which presence would at least force him to breathe. Absent this tobacco-paper angel, all he can do is gnaw at his lip, and knuckle at the arms of his glasses, askew on his face. Cam’s hair is dark, a scissor-slash of the colour of a winter field, of antique tile, or good tobacco, short enough that pinning it up is only vaguely achievable at all, and only then via an impossibly complicated architecture of pins that would drive any engineer to jealous weeping. Cam’s hair is so soft and so perfectly straight that it escapes anyway, playing fugitive at her neck and around her ears in a way that makes him want to weep, compose poetry, or furiously masturbate, all in equal measure.

He adjusts the angle of her head with one palm slotted between her occipital bone and the proud arch of her neck. He tells himself it was necessary to do so, and knows himself a liar.

“Sorry, I—the angle’s wrong. Sit down?”

Cam sits.

He slides the first pin out with anoxic, empty-lunged deliberation, moving as though underwater. Then another. A third. Cam sighs again, a soft exhale of relief.

It’s the sigh that undoes him—Palamedes blames it for everything after.

It’s the sigh, and the hour, and that everyone at dinner could be slotted onto a spectrum ranging from _brainless dilettante_ to _shambling moron_ , and that not one of them could even be prevailed upon to offer any funding, or to die conveniently; that when the last pin is laid to rest with its fellows, and he is combing through her hair with his fingers to look for strays he already knows he won’t find, in blatant disregard of every rule he has ever made, it’s that Cam groans, a low, satisfied hum, and tips her head back over the edge of the chair until her skull rests against his shirtfront, eyes closed, lashes rustling on her cheek.

Experimentally, he digs his fingers in harder, tracing obscure figures into her scalp. She groans again.

From a very long way off, Palamedes hears himself say:

“In the interest of continuing to make your being bribed to kill me extortionately expensive,” and he hears himself swallow, “would you like me to keep going?”

* * *

What she should say is, _Thank you, Warden, but it’s time I went to bed_ , and what she should do is collect her clothes and leave. What she should not do is sit in Palamedes’ bedroom with her head resting in the narrow arch of his ribs.

Like always, Palamedes has unlaced her corset without needing to be told how, the same way he laced it earlier, and the same way he’s been doing it all this time. Camilla should be glad. It’s efficient.

Jealousy would be childish. If she cared to examine it, which she doesn’t, she’s only bitter, deep in her chest like misplaced acid, at not being good enough for him to want.

Palamedes’ body is so much warmer than she would have expected, if she’d thought to imagine it before, which she hasn’t. Camilla says, “In the interest of keeping you apprised, Warden, I could name at least five people downstairs who have much more money than they have research that you wouldn’t publicly discredit.”

“Ah, hence the knife,” Palamedes says, “to open the envelopes.” He slides his fingers to her hairline and begins to massage in firm, steady circles. She shivers, just once, all the way down to her toes.

Camilla breathes out and lets her body relax just a little. “Shame we left when we did,” she says, meditative. “I was close to getting the chance to use it.”

“A terrible shame, I think.” Palamedes’ voice is barely a murmur, not much louder than his fingers sifting through her hair. He tilts her head forward, agonisingly gentle, so he can reach all of it.

Camilla hums in agreement, and Palamedes works in patterns she can’t decipher over the crown of her head, behind her ears, back to her hairline. It’s worth every memory she’s going to wish tomorrow that she didn’t have.

Palamedes’ thumbs dig in at the seat of her skull, in the space between the muscles of her neck, and another noise comes up from her throat. He keeps going. When his hands reach the base of her neck he rests them whisper-light on her shoulders, an invitation, brushing the fabric of her chemise.

“At least,” Camilla says, “ten people, in fact.”

Palamedes’ hands span the breadth of each shoulder, thumbs working into the muscles either side of her spine.

“I had no idea I was in such mortal danger,” he says, shifting slightly where he stands. “I might have tried to enjoy myself a little.”

“I could warn you next time, if you’d like,” Camilla says.

“Please. I’ll do us both a favour and get spectacularly drunk, to make it easier.”

“Appreciated, Warden. But you wouldn’t need to.”

“Hmm.” Palamedes goes silent, thinking. Then he says, very quietly, so quietly that Camilla isn’t convinced she heard him say it at all, “Christ. You could break me in half, if you wanted to.”

* * *

Fact: While typically described as single insertion, the attachment of the deltoid to the skeleton beneath can be divided into three main areas, corresponding to the major sets of discrete fibrous groups, or heads, those being: the anterior part, arising from the anterior border and upper surface of the lateral third of the clavicle; the intermediate, arising from the superior surface of the acromion process; and the posterior, arising from the lower lip of the posterior border of the spine of the scapula.

Fact: The trapezius muscle, whose superior and middle fibres also comprise what are commonly thought to be the muscles of the shoulder, attaches also to the clavicle and the scapulae, as well as to the occipital bone in its superior part; it is subject to several known pathologies, and is one of the larger muscles in the human body.

Fact: He is a fair anatomist, but only when it suits him, and no number of attachments could brace him against what Cam’s shoulders feel like under his hands. He fumbles for metaphor, and falls flat on his face.

Fact: If he can make himself focus only on the facts, he might just survive this.

It’s just—

It’s just that she is only doing this, is only allowing him to do this, because she thinks he’s joking, but he is so, so pathetically grateful for the indulgence. He is so pathetically grateful that the chair back comes up just enough to routinely and repeatedly stab him in the hip most nights, which means that now there is no chance of Cam seeing, no chance of her feeling how miserably hard he is already, just from this, cock tenting the fall of his trousers. It’s just that her skin is so warm. That her hair is so soft. It’s just that he is less drunk than he could be, but possibly drunker than he thought. Dizzy. It’s just that every noise she makes is _such_ a noise, and he would cheerfully burn the building down around them both if it meant that she would keep making them.

Palamedes works fingers and knuckles into her shoulders, into her neck. He looks, eyes cast down so she won’t see them, looks at the ridge of her vertebrae. He stares as if, by staring, he could peel back dermis and fascia and bone and see straight through her, and tries to think only of the parts, not the strong, sun-browned whole of her.

He fails, quite spectacularly, with his hands hovering in the air next to both of her biceps like moths drawn to light.

His mouth moves without him.

“Christ. You could break me in half, if you wanted to.”

Fact: There is a gap between the shaft of the radius and ulna, through which runs the ulnar nerve, the largest in the human body to be unprotected by bone or muscle. This is the gap along which Cam slots her thumb, pressing down, her fingers tight and hot around his wrist.

Fact: The electrified shiver that runs through his entire body is only partly because of the associated nervous response.

Fact: He is, if anything, harder than before.

Fact: Saying anything right now would be absolutely insane. Would shatter whatever thing is between them, pop it like so much soap suds.

Palamedes swallows, and repeats:

“I think. If you wanted to, you could break me in half.”

His pulse throbs in at least three different places. It flutters rabbity and frantic at his throat. Pounds like the mute insanity of an ocean through his sinuses, a roar that might as well be silent, too loud to hear. And in humiliated, shameful arousal he categorically refuses to ever examine, his cock jumps.

Her hand is calloused, palm rough. Strong.

She says, very quietly:

“Yes. Yes, I think I could.”

* * *

It’s the voice Palamedes uses when he’s thinking to himself, quiet and wondering, not much more than an idea.

His wrist and forearm aren’t much more than an idea, either. Camilla—as if this is a dream, or just imagination, and not what it is, which is the end of everything as she knows it—wraps her fingers around the disastrous thinness of his wrist. Between the long bones of his arm, the edge of her thumbnail digs into the skin.

He pauses, then swallows, then takes a breath.

“I think,” he says, “if you wanted to, you could break me in half.”

The pulse in his wrist jumps under her hand; her own does, everywhere. Her face is impossibly hot.

Camilla says, “Yes. Yes, I think I could,” and tenses her thighs against the immediate, unbearable throb in her cunt.

There are any number of things she could do, which she has never allowed herself to properly contemplate. It would be so easy, she thinks, with her hand around his wrist, just to hold him down.

The sensible thing would be to let him go. The most sane, reasonable thing would be to go back through the door, and go to bed, and bury her burning face in a pillow and bring herself off furious and ashamed, and never think about this again. It’s only that the chance to do that has long since passed.

Camilla sits in the chair and feels Palamedes move, his body leaning towards her, and she begins to turn to face him.

There’s only one way this can go. All at once, without giving him the chance to comprehend, Camilla rises from the chair, twists Palamedes’ arm behind his back, and pushes him face-first into the wall of his bedroom.

Palamedes’ other arm comes up to his side. She takes hold of that one, too, over the tendons of his forearm, his hand flexing helplessly against the wall.

He bursts out with an incredulous, asthmatic laugh, and gasps, “Exactly, just—just like that.”

She _could_ break him in half, and half again, and another half after that. It wouldn’t be hard. He is nothing but a collection of joints, all the raw-boned angles of him, with only enough muscle to shiver, and to breathe hard under her chest.

Camilla pushes up onto her toes, because Palamedes is nearly a foot taller than her, so goddamn tall she can’t reach anything, and slowly brushes her lips over the base of his neck where his seventh cervical vertebra juts out. She holds there for an endless moment, feeling the wild heat of him, his stuttering breaths. Then she sets her teeth on him and bites.

* * *

He hits the wall like a heart attack, glasses clattering to the floor, and for an insane, idiot instant all Palamedes can think is that it really is astonishingly ugly wallpaper; an awful, bruisy yellow, halfheartedly paisley with stunted aspirations towards jacquard, without quite managing to be either. He scrabbles at the thwarted tangle of jaundiced florals, cheek crushed to the wall, and—laughs.

A breathless, stuttering chuckle tears from his throat, and Palamedes wheezes:

“Exactly, just—just like that.”

It hurts.

It hurts, the way his arm is twisted up behind him, the way that her hand pushes into his wrist—Palamedes cocks his head, straining to hear the click and the creak of his metacarpals grinding together under her palm—and it hurts, and the hurt is possibly the best thing to ever happen to him in his entire life. It’s too good to be real, he reasons, and so it must not be, which means that none of the rules matter anymore, which means he can just. Have this. Just once.

He mouths at the wall, whimpering. Closes his eyes. It’s all he can do to press himself back into her, bowing his head and curling into the hollow bird-bones of his chest, because she could break him in half, and he _wants_ her to break him in half. The want lances into him like a knife, and he heaves another shallow, shuddering breath, eyes going hot and glassy.

She bites down on his neck, and he nearly sobs.

“Cam,” he pants, swallowing hard, “Camilla, please. Please.”

She curls her fingers into his collar, palms at the line of his throat. Palamedes stops breathing. _Maybe,_ some part of him hopes, _maybe she’ll take the hint and choke him_. She sets her teeth to the meat of his shoulder, what little there is where it meets his neck, and bites down again, and _sucks_ , coaxing out a livid bruise. Her one hand skims down his wrist to his arm to his chest, and—stops.

He feels—drugged, and boneless, and deliriously content, pinned like an exotic beetle for display, and it is only because he can _feel_ her raise her eyebrows that he manages to scrape together some scrap of lucidity.

“They’re considered very fashionable,” he murmurs.

“Are they.”

She flicks the edge of her thumbnail against the silver barbell pierced through his nipple. Palamedes gasps.

“Extremely.”

Cam snorts into the back of his shoulder, grip going slack.

“Ridiculous,” she opines. “Utterly nonsensical.”

“Ouch.” He curls his hand over hers on his chest, turning—an awkward, graceless wriggle that a more coherent man would wince at the mere concept of—to face her. “Whatever can I do,” he rasps, “to win back your good graces? I’d hate to think you don’t respect me anymore.”

Too genuine. Palamedes buries his expression in her hair instead, nosing softly at her jaw.

* * *

When Palamedes turns around, he is flushed all the way down his neck to his chest, red and gleaming with sweat, his shirt pushed to one side. His voice is scratchy and low as he murmurs about good graces, leaning down to brush his mouth over her neck, hands coming up to span her waist.

Camilla turns her face into the heat of his skin, breathing hard against his temple. “I question your assumption, Warden,” she says, “that you had many of my good graces to begin with.”

Palamedes hums into her neck. “Well. In that case.”

He kisses the edge of her jaw, along its line, the soft part right under it. Camilla wraps her fingers around the back of his head and digs her fingers into the angles of his skull. She really could stab him like this; right in the exposed part of his neck would do it. Messy, though. He deserves something more refined than that. She’ll have to tell him that she’ll make sure it costs extra.

Because that’s what he’s doing, still, convincing her that she shouldn’t assassinate him if anyone ever tries to bribe her, and he’s taking the act much, much too far. He’s only bored or frustrated enough to want it regardless of the fact that it’s her, who he has never wanted. She’ll take anything she can get, God help her. Just this once.

Camilla, or her lunatic dream self, or whoever she is in a world where this can happen, reaches down to the waistband of Palamedes’ trousers to untuck his shirt and pull it over his head. He is a wretched waif of a man, a sprawling mass of overdeveloped ectoderm, and _both_ of his nipples are pierced with the ridiculous silver bars. Camilla skims a hand over his chest and pinches one of them only half as hard as she really could.

Palamedes gasps again, an abrupt, choked thing, and pulls her closer towards him. He is unmistakably hard, the line of his cock pressing into her stomach.

“Point taken,” he says, breathless and dry. “But I’m keeping them.”

Camilla says, “Suit yourself, Warden.”

He mouths at her hairline now, unfastens her petticoat and removes the rest of her clothes as efficiently as he did the corset. Camilla does not wonder what he does with anyone else, or whether he looks at them the same. Palamedes slides his hands up over her ribs to take the weight of her breasts in his palms, thumbs tracing over her nipples, and another noise comes up from her throat. She shifts forward and feels how impossibly wet she is.

His thigh presses in between hers and she thinks, _Yes_ , and _Like that_ , and _Please_ , and says none of them. She wants to push him back into the wall and grind on him until she can’t think. Before she gets the chance, he starts to guide her backwards, one hand on her hip.

The back of her legs hit the chair. Camilla sits, close to the edge, and Palamedes follows her down to fall on his knees in front of her. The reality of it is dizzying.

Palamedes’ hands start on the tendons at the back of her ankles, sliding with agonising languor up from her calves around to her shins, and when they reach her knees he guides them just slightly more apart, leaning in to kiss the hollow on the inside of each one. His hands rest there, at the top of her thighs.

Camilla, breathless and insensible with want, says, “Yes—”

Palamedes murmurs something she doesn’t catch, but which sounds like, “Thank you,” even though that can’t be it, and then he moves forward and hooks her thighs over his shoulders to close his mouth over her cunt.

Camilla’s whole body tightens at once, straining towards his mouth, and a low moan comes up from her chest. She clutches desperately at Palamedes’ head, his hair being too short to pull, her other hand braced on the edge of the chair behind her in an attempt to balance.

She feels hot all over, too big for her skin and then too small, the muscles tensing in her legs as Palamedes’ mouth works at her folds, bringing slickness up to her clit to close over it and suck hard. There’s no space, no time to catch her breath, only the pressure and the fast, steady rhythm. His fingertips dig into her thighs.

She could laugh, she really could, dazed with pleasure and disbelief. His jaw is stronger than she might have given him credit for, because he doesn’t stop once.

Camilla falls forward over him, legs starting to tremble. His mouth pulls at her clit again and again—almost, _almost_ —and then he swipes his tongue hard over it and after one desperate second of nothingness she comes and comes and _comes_.

She can only moan, senseless and shuddering, clamping her thighs around his head. He works her through it, easing back just enough, and keeps going like this is the only thing keeping him alive.

* * *

Her thighs clamp around his head, cunt fluttering on his tongue, and Palamedes muffles a choked, sticky groan into the crease of Cam’s hip.

Her heel digs into his spine. His knees hurt from kneeling, and his jaw hurts from the pressure he’s keeping up, tonguing leisurely at her clit, licking into her with a slow, aching deliberation, and it’s only that if he reached down to wrap a hand around himself to ease the awful ache in his trapped cock, he would have to let go of her leg, which is a thing he cannot do. It’s only that this is the only thing he has ever wanted, it’s just that it’s such a _relief_ to just be a thing on the carpet, just a mouth, just a thing that Cam is curled over like something she’s _protecting_ , or something she killed, all the long, leonine muscles of her stomach flinching and clenching under his hands.

He feels…

Palamedes _feels_ , and that’s the most extraordinary thing, that he just feels, and cannot manage to think of anything except how desperately he wants to make her come again. Again, after that.

Palamedes flattens his tongue against her clit, and sucks—Palamedes smears open-mouthed, greedy kisses which are more breath and vowels than anything like a kiss over her hips and knees and cunt—Palamedes circles the crease of her hip with his thumb like all the answers to everything, like all the love in the world is hiding inside the socket of her hip joint—traces the edge of one knuckle over the whole hot, trembling length of her, and pushes into her with two fingers, and fucks her like that, still lapping messily at her clit until she pushes the heel of her hand into his forehead and _shoves_ him away.

He stares, panting and shivering, blinking stupidly up at her.

Palamedes swallows. He drags the pad of his thumb—lightly, barely there—back over the seam of her cunt.

“Enough, that’s—” Cam shudders, voice gone low and gravely, “— _enough_.”

She plants one foot on his shoulder, and _pushes_. Palamedes falls back onto his elbows, chest heaving, thighs falling open in a helpless sprawl. Just a thing on the carpet.

Cam follows him down, pushing down on his chest with one hand, and her hair back from her face with the other.

“I should make you write a thank-you letter,” she pants, “to whoever taught you to do that.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he breathes, “ _you_ handle my correspondence, Camilla. I’m very busy, I can’t be expected t—”

“Can’t be arsed, I think you mean.”

Palamedes tips his head back onto the rug, arms flung over his head, while Cam pets warmly at the stark line of his throat.

“That, too,” he murmurs.

It’s to stop him mouthing off, or to stop him from saying something she doesn’t want to hear—they’re doing this on the floor, after all, not a bed, which makes perfect sense; chairs and carpets are just an _indiscretion_ , but a bed would _mean_ something—it’s to shut him up. He knows it is.

Palamedes sucks her fingers anyway, when she pushes them into his slack mouth, muffling tiny, bitten-off cries against the whorls of her fingerprints. Chases her hand, even, half-rising onto his elbows as she starts to pull away to fumble his trousers open.

Cam flattens her other hand against his sternum, in between the stuttering heave of his ribs, and pushes him back down, and he goes, sinking down with a thin whine caught in the back of his throat, staring up at her braced on knees and elbows above him.

Fact: This isn’t real. This can’t be real.

Fact: He has always, his whole life, bruised shockingly easily for a man of his complexion.

Fact: He will have bruises tomorrow, from the floor and the ugly wallpaper, and the chokehold, and Cam will have been the one to make them, splotchy like a letter you never send over the papery stretch of his skin, and—

Fact: He should remind her, tell her to be careful.

“People are going to think,” he gasps, “think I’ve been in some kind of struggle—”

“So don’t struggle.”

Cam catches both of his wrists—not _really_ small enough for her to hold in one hand, not both of them, but he lets her drag them both up as if they are—and pins them up above his head, and he chokes out a stuttered curse, and nods, almost frantically, before she’s even asked him to keep them there. She wraps one hand around his neck, and one around his cock, and _squeezes._

It’s the lack of oxygen. It’s that Cam understood—always understands. It’s that it’s _her_. It’s that he’s so far gone already that it takes barely two, three strokes, for everything to unravel.

Cam curls her hand around the tip of his cock to catch a smear of precome when it wells up, and slicks it back down, her teeth set against the points of his ribs, and he wheezes starved half-breaths against her palm, blissfully anoxic, and comes choking and clawing at the floorboards.

Everything goes syrupy after that, a warm, loose interval where time stops existing. Palamedes rolls the stubbly prominence of his occipital bone back and forth across the carpet as his breathing slows, watching through slitted eyes as Cam eases off of him, gratifyingly shaky-legged as she collects sofa cushions and blankets from around the room to deposit them on the carpet next to him, followed by the pillows from his bed. Palamedes turns his head, drowsily opening his eyes.

“For your convenience, Warden,” Camilla says. “We can’t have people thinking I’m too hard on you.”

He lofts an eyebrow at her.

“We’re a little past titles, don’t you think?”

Cam regards him steadily, and says nothing.

Palamedes laughs again, a short exhale through his nose, and sits up to help assemble everything into a makeshift nest, gathering Camilla up under his chin, and arranging her limbs as comfortably as he can manage across the wretched boniness of his chest. Which is to say that she can’t be especially comfortable, but also isn’t pulling away.

With excruciating gentleness, he tilts his head down to kiss her hair.

It sticks to his mouth, and he pulls away sputtering, picking hair off of his lips with a grimace.

Camilla snorts. “Should have left the pins in.”

“I don’t think I need another piercing, thank you,” Palamedes says. His hand drops down to her shoulder, over the highest point of her clavicle and along her acromion process, down the outside of her arm and round to the muscles of her back. He flattens his palm against her shoulder blade, rubbing in slow circles. Cam noses under his jaw, nuzzling into his pulse.

“Cam,” he mumbles. “Thank you for hanging up my jacket, I never would have done it.”

Camilla shoves at him with no real effort. “I know, Warden,” she says into his neck. “I don’t suppose you did me the courtesy of hanging up anything of mine.”

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know how. I only look at books, you know, my skills are really quite limited…”

There’s a bruise coming in on his wrist, and Palamedes thinks, very distantly, that he’ll have to make sure he can cover it with his gloves tomorrow, when the—

Shit.

Abruptly, his hand stills.

* * *

The idea of sleeping on the floor of Palamedes’ bedroom is more or less insane, but so is the idea of fucking him, and she’s just done that. She’s had worse nights. Camilla noses at Palamedes’ jawline, softly kisses his neck, cautiously enjoys the warmth of his skin.

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know how,” he’s saying. “I only look at books, you know, my skills are really quite limited…”

Then, abruptly, his hand goes still. Cam pulls away, frowning.

“What is it?”

“The donors are coming tomorrow,” he groans, pressing a hand over his eyes. His voice cracks a little, gone stilted and gritty. “The. Third. Will be there.”

The Third—Coronabeth and Ianthe Tridentarius and their detestable show dog Naberius Tern—are richer than God. They are also the worst people Camilla and Palamedes know. They come to these things because they have money and time, and because Ianthe has aspirations of scientific grandeur and there is a frankly worrying degree of possibility that she might actually pull it off. The fact of their unpleasantness has not stopped Palamedes from fucking at least one of them. Nor does it stop Camilla from thanking them, somewhere in the back of her mind, for intruding on the moment before something broke. This, at least, is familiar territory.

Camilla gathers herself and blinks at him evenly, and presses her lips into a cool, thin line. “If anything, Warden, I’d say that’s an opportunity for you. Guaranteed cash, no talk necessary, so long as Tern puts his money where your mouth is. Worked well enough for you last time.”

The way Palamedes’ lip curls then is close to priceless. “The amount of funding I received,” he sniffs haughtily, “was not even close to commensurate with the quality of fellatio he was given.”

Camilla could have told him that Tern would be a lost cause, but she tends not to stop him from making mistakes, only gently chides him when necessary and teases him at every opportunity.

“Your perfectionism must be a terrible burden,” she says, patting his other shoulder without an ounce of sympathy. She settles back down on his chest and he starts to run his fingers through her hair again, gentle and slow. She tenses, wrong-footed in the face of this strange new intimacy, but the look on Palamedes’ face is so familiar, and so _him_ , acerbically melodramatic, and faintly myopic without his glasses on, with the same sleepless creases it always has. He’s just himself. The tension bleeds out of her all at once.

“Look,” he says. “I will have you know, Cam, that that was _one_ time, and far from compelling, as I think will be clear; and, besides, I note your interest in the attendance of Tridentarius, the elder.”

Camilla hadn’t known he knew about that. “Spent the funding on some nicer clothes,” she says.

“Good,” says Palamedes. “I need you to make me look respectable, as we have discussed on numerous occasions. However. I fear that not even you could save me tomorrow, because I don’t know how I can give a talk like this, least of all to people who might be disposed to provide me with funding so that I can continue to outperform them in every way—I’m sure I look like a Dalmatian in any half-decent light.”

“I value your sense of drama, as always, Warden,” Camilla drawls. “You can always ice the bruises if you’re so concerned about it.”

“Maybe I would, if somebody saw fit to do their job, perhaps as valet, and fetch some ice for it. Honestly, Cam, what am I even paying you for?”

Camilla snorts. “You’re paying me not to kill you, and to keep anyone else from paying _me_ to kill you. We’ve established this at—” her mouth twitches ruefully “—some length.”

“I would never presume to call attention to the length,” he says, lifting one hand from her waist to gesture crudely, “that would be arrogant even for me.”

Camilla shoves his hand back down.

“I’m going to need another bribe, Warden, not to kill you for that one,” she says flatly.

“Of course. At your earliest convenience,” he murmurs into her hair.

She rolls back up onto her heels, straddling his waist with a knee to either side, and says:

“You can start now.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Victorians really were briefly obsessed with nipple piercings, we checked.  
> Works cited:  
> \- English Mechanic and World of Science 49, no. 1249 (1888).  
> \- Kern, Stephen. Anatomy and Destiny: a Cultural History of the Human Body. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.  
> \- Koenig, Laura M., and Molly Carnes. “Body Piercing.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 14, no. 6 (1999): 379–85. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.1999.00357.x.


End file.
